1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of computers, and specifically to the logic for managing portals and portlet views.
2. Description of the Related Art
A web portal (portal) is software that presents information from diverse sources to a user in a consistent manner. That is, portals provide a way for a content provider to present information from diverse sources to a user such that the information has a consistent appearance on a page. Often, a portal is devoted to a particular subject, such as e-mail, weather, finance, sports, enterprise-centric information, etc.
Portlets are user interface software components that can be plugged into a portal, and are managed and displayed in the portal. As such, portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal page.
Thus, a portal application may consist of many portlets, and each portlet may have many different views of very complicated user interface design, such as customer call center service applications for insurance agents. Because of the complexity of the views of the portlets, it is very difficult and time-consuming to develop those portlets. Since a group of portal developers often develop those portlets separately in a portal project, it is very difficult to create a consistent look and feel among those portlets. It is also very difficult for others to understand and maintain the codes of those portlets.
Portal developers often apply application development tools to create portlets. These tools provide wizards to let developers drag and drop the user interface elements into portlets. However, these wizards are at the user interface element level, such as an input field and a button, and are not at the application level.